OK, here’s a thing. I now work directly with this stuff every day. The violent criminals that feed on others, the clueless white administrators who mean well (or don’t), the stunned or jaded regular folk who cannot understand why the world keeps turning out this way. So, I’m going with Eliot’s little birdy on this one: I can’t bear very much reality.

But you know what I can bear the shit out of? Magic realism. Especially dark magic realist takes on the facts of human existence. And I’ll even go a step further and say I like these to be brutal. Like, in the game we just started, there are shapeshifters who come from Elsewhere, so Wild faction, the immigrants. They’re posing as Latinos who have shown up to do day-labor on a massive Urban renewal project. They live in bad, cramped conditions, waiting for their chance to safely reveal themselves as competitive members of the city’s supernatural community. And they are absolutely primed to be painted as fearsome, invasive Others by the Wizards and Vampires and shit.

We can have the discussion about how the places this vision of Latino migration doesn’t accord with reality. But I’m not here to paint a faithful image of what Latino experience in a north-Midwestern American city looks like. If I wanted to do that, I’d do a fuckload of resesrch and write a novel. What I want to do is to create an opportunity for us to play with the ideas of having to conceal one’s identity and presence except during certain activities, places, and times (out front of the Home Depot at 4:00am, for example). I want to say a few worthwhile things and move on without doing too much violence to the authentic experience of Latinos.

Because my reality is that on Monday, I’m going to have to help racists without losing my shit on them and then go help actual Latinos deal with actual problems.